tender contributions

We are living through a time of profound unknowing—an unraveling of the world as we knew it. How do we sit with the uncertainty, the grief, and the transformation it calls us into? In this episode, I explore the deep reckonings that have shaped me and how they have led to my new offerings in the world.

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For years, I lived with a secret—a shame rooted in feeling like I wasn’t enough. While the world saw someone “put together,” inside I struggled with basic tasks, overwhelming sensitivity, and a crushing sense of inadequacy. This year, everything shifted when I began to understand myself through the lens of neurodivergence and was diagnosed with ADHD.

In this episode, I share my journey of unmasking: from years of self-doubt to discovering the empowering idea of “the many faces of the mind.” I explore how sensitivity, often dismissed as a weakness, can be a superpower—propelling us to imagine new ways forward, especially in challenging times. Drawing inspiration from Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and the concept of Earthseed, we’ll delve into the unique gifts of neurodivergent individuals as visionaries and connectors in a fractured world.

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Today's offering is born from being caught in a terrifying storm last week—literally and metaphorically. As I sat in the chaos, watching the Earth cry, I found myself questioning what true power really looks like—not the kind that dominates, but the kind that nurtures and connects.

In many Indigenous traditions, life is guided by two sacred obligations: serving the planet and all species yet to come. Western colonial culture, in contrast, centres on rights—on what we are owed. We are seeing this destructive mindset in real-time.  But obligations remind us that survival isn’t about ‘me’ but about ‘we.’ The Earth is crying—our Great Mother is crying—and how can we not cry with her? Yet even in the cracks of despair, there is space for something new to take root: a way of living that honours life, care, and community.

With the Age of Aquarius upon us for the next twenty years, this shift feels especially resonant—asking us to move from individualism to collective care, from isolation to interconnection. This isn’t a time for despair but for remembering our shared responsibilities and building the resilient communities that will hold us through the storms. Together, we can plant something new rooted in care and connection.

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*a soft and gentle reminder that liking + sharing this post is one way of supporting this newsletter*

These days, I mark the start and end of my day the same way, by taking a front seat at the window of my temporary apartment by the sea to watch the many swallows have their playtime. Every sunrise and sunset, the horizon becomes a dance floor of more of them than I can count, their joyous cacophony in front of the backdrop of the changing colours of the sky. They take turns chasing each other, sweeping high and low; their little bodies beam with a lightness, moving and flying like they don’t have a care in the world that could possibly weigh them down. Pure euphoric sweetness. At moments, I have envied these little swallows while gazing up at them. Even though I know that honouring the everyday grief that surrounds us impacts our very capacity for joy and vice versa. That feeling of pure joy has been so hard for me to access this year. 

The powerful combination of the recent summer solstice and the full moon in Capricorn has brought to light my own behaviours and patterns that have kept me small, revealing how I have internalised dominant, binary, and supremacist thinking due to living and being conditioned under these insidious interconnecting structures. Leading me to adopt the very same harmful myths and illusions of separation, weaponizing them towards others, including the people I truly love who love me. The stars are telling me it’s time to grow up and end this cycle of these ways of being so that I can commit to a new way and vision.

Audre Lorde taught us that “the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house”, but she also expanded on this by reminding us that “they may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change”. I myself have been using my shadow tool of choice: judgement. Mainly towards how other people are ‘showing or not showing up’ now. Even though, as people of conscience who are concerned for a better and more just future here for all of us - we must be asking ourselves - how did we get here - and what needs to happen in order to disrupt the culture that enables this dehumanisation and supremacy to continue - is extremely pivotal and important, I can see how my own judgement towards others has often tended to be a projection of the judgement that in reality I have towards myself, for not feeling like I am doing ‘enough’. At its root, that is just trying to mask the sheer helplessness and powerlessness I have been drowning in. By absorbing so much terror alone on this tiny screen of my phone, without having proper rituals around holding the sheer grief and pain of all these apocalypses colliding at once with others, my body and mind have started to shut down. I’ve been sick more than I ever have in my entire adulthood, and my mental health has been on edge, to say the least - and I know I’m not alone here. 

I want to be clear; I am not shaming myself or my body for not wanting to participate in any form of business as usual right now when everything in the world is telling us to stop. (Our survival as a world and species tells us we must stop everything we are doing!!!!) I know that I’ve been this down merely signals that I am still alive and have a soul! But I don’t want to shut down completely for good. I want to honour these moments of collapse, but I also want to be able to get back up again. These years ahead will only bring more disruption, and I want to participate in imperfectly dreaming of an alternative whether it comes to some fruition or not. To do nothing and quit now is just too unbearable of an option.

Despite ‘just tryna stay soft in a hard world’ being my mantra for so many years now, as an already highly sensitive person acutely aware of the presence of loss in every moment of life, these months of such utterly disgusting horror and unspeakable abhorrent levels of violence have tipped me over the edge, undeniably hardening my shell. Some days, my body has felt like an anvil, stopping me from showing up in ways I want to. I have been struggling to hold my own complexities as I navigate the many paradoxes of being alive at this time; so many things that used to bring me happiness instead have been bringing me so much guilt and shame. Despite yearning to find another way to live for so long, I try to fight the disillusionment by how the webs of extractivist violent systems of capitalism feel almost impossible to untether from completely. I know I need to find another way to live than to beat myself with this unhelpful rigid stick that is unable to hold my very own complexity. I am trying to continue my own journey of healing, to have the courage to face my own pain so I can move away from constantly being caught in ego, disconnection and reactivity. Allow me to exist in this grey space of not knowing and cultivate more self-compassion for the complex paradoxes. 

In a bid to come back into my body, to transmute and alchemise the anvil, I have committed to spending the next few months learning about somatic embodied leadership. In the training I’m in, they view somatics as a way to grow and lead better by connecting mind, body, and spirit through mindful movement and self-awareness and by aligning actions with our core values, often asking us to reflect on how collective transformation serves our personal transformation and vice versa. In class this week, we’ve started to explore what is called ‘conditioned tendencies’. In somatics, conditioned tendencies are our automatic responses and patterns that happen under pressure that impact our thinking/feelings/mood, actions or non-actions, beliefs, muscular contractions, and ways of relating. These are most often learned in our early life as survival mechanisms. They become embodied because we don’t even think of them as they happen instantly. This reactivity is our adaptation to all human safety, belonging, and dignity needs. Often, many of us are making choices to trade one for two or two for one, for example, opting for safety and sacrificing our belonging and dignity. By working with our conditioned tendencies, we want to offer ourselves more space and choices to respond differently.

Our conditioned tendencies often show up in the following ways:

* Moving towards others: moving towards the pressure, getting close to it for safety or appeasement. It can make one seem overly nice as one tries to stay near the pressure source.

* Moving away from others: involves pulling back and fading into the background for safety and avoiding conflict. One might want connection but pull away, avoid eye contact, not talk to others, not engage at all, or feel the need to disappear.

* Moving against others: When faced with pressure, this tendency manifests as fighting for safety or dignity. It manifests as defensiveness, responding to challenges, and putting up walls. When someone approaches, one feels the pressure and responds by reinforcing their defences.

By becoming more aware and working with our embodied responses, we can expand and hold more to move towards the things we want and yearn for. I can recognise that I’ve mostly been responding and reacting by turning away from others (both in person and online) and shutting down when I ultimately wanted a sense of deep connection. 

Have you ever wondered why we don’t actually have to do anything to fall into the depths of despair, but to stay positive and have faith takes a form of action? How often does our failure to take action also connect to this impossible need for something to be done perfectly? How much does this stop us from even trying? The now 95-year-old lifelong iconic activist,  Buddhist and deep ecologist Joanna Macy says, “Of all the dangers we face from climate chaos to nuclear warfare, none is so great as the deadening of our response”. Her antidote to shutting down is The Work That Reconnects. The Work That Reconnects is a transformative journey through four…

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For as long as I can remember, I’ve known that I want to have a child.

When I close my eyes, I can often feel the essence of my child around me. They feel familiar yet new, grounded yet ethereal, playful yet wise—like love. 

Maybe it’s a combination of being 36, that it’s spring, the season associated with fertility, or maybe written in the stars, but I currently know a colossal number of women (cis and mostly in heteronormative partnerships) who have either just given birth, are currently pregnant, or trying to have a baby. That line I’ve heard over the years, “You hit a certain age, and suddenly everyone around you is having a baby”, well, I am at that age, and that is exactly what is happening. Some of these expectant mothers are my nearest and dearest friends and I am so excited to welcome these new babies, but I cannot deny the ache of longing my body feels to be on that journey myself. As it stands, that is currently not my path. Instead, I have recently left a relationship, am in my fifth month of being without my own home, and am currently staying with my mother. I have come back to her because I am in a moment in my life where I need her again. I am currently in my own process of gestation and feel an intrinsic bodily yearning to be near her womb to recalibrate. 

I am hearing the call of this monumental time in the world, a time when we are collectively starting to confront all these interwebs of harm and oppression, as well as the true cost of the myth of progress we have been indoctrinated with. The collapse of empires is always violent and ugly, as people with power will never give it up freely. We are being asked to either birth a new paradigm by radically transforming ourselves, to go back into the womb of creation to understand how we can constructively support ourselves and each other through this disruption, or to stay within our current one, along a path powered by greed, destruction and, most of all, fear. We are at the crossroads of our existence, and the pendulum can still swing either way.

When reflecting on the choices I’ve made in my life that were powered by fear, there are many. The things I have done (or not done) because I was afraid, afraid I was not enough, afraid of not being loved, afraid of being alone, afraid of what others thought of me, afraid of losing, the list goes on. There is something so freeing about this moment in time where I am living out so many of my greatest fears, and yet here I am still alive! I am learning that if we are not able to face our fears and inadequacies head-on, we cannot heal them, that our unwillingness as a world to sit with our fears is ultimately what continues to fuel them, and we end up building our world from fear instead of love.

Like the humble caterpillar, I know that for me to move forward, my life as I know it has to be disintegrated into soup. I’m still in the process of coming apart, I am still here in the sticky darkness of the cocoon. I don’t know how long I’ll be in here for, as this darkness transcends time, but even in the darkness, I feel the beauty and potentiality of the butterfly permeating all around me. My disintegration has been undoubtedly painful but it has also come with moments of such an acute sense of aliveness and humbling beauty. I must now care for myself as I am a baby in my own womb, to live as if I am already pregnant. I must nourish myself with all the things that are good for me from the food I eat, to the amount of rest I get, as well as be mindful of how I process my feelings and how I honour my capacity for dreaming and imagination. That means intentionally withdrawing from places, things and people that aren’t energetically conducive to this moment of growth. Like a tender tendril, I must protect myself at all costs. 

So often in life, we find ourselves in environments that cannot support our growth process. It’s so hard to leave behind something, someone, somewhere or a way of being that once worked, but seasons change, life changes and proverbial spaces that once felt so safe can start to feel like cells when we have outgrown them. Now, more than ever, I understand that to move forward, all the different aspects of my life from where I live/how I live/my relationships/my work etc. cannot be thought of as separate, they must all expand together to come into the deepest alignment. 

Living under our current system has given birth to new complexities around having children. The emergence of our planet's recurrent exploitation and extraction will undoubtedly continue to impact our survival. The persistent rising living costs (food, healthcare, childcare and housing), as well as the lack of systemic support for mothers, have created an almost impossible and inhospitable environment for raising children. The morality around having a child knowing what we know now about where our planet is headed is something I continue to wrestle with all the time. Is ignorance really bliss? Or is there power and purpose in accepting reality? What learning is there for us in creating a supportive and nourishing environment in such a time of destruction? Maybe this is what it means to decide still to have a child when the collapse of life is seemingly on the horizon, especially for those of us who currently have the luxury of living in relative safety as beneficiaries of the system in place. Despite the fear all around us, our children are our teachers, seeds of hope and intention for something better. Not only do they bring joy in a time of such immense grief but they are an act of ultimate dedication to a future, to communal transformation and a panacea for the dangerously alluring cynicism, nihilism and fatalism that seems to be ever-growing in our current society. I’ve been deeply moved by the many recent interventions and movements led by young people and parents worldwide who have been coming together to work as protectors and truth-tellers for the liberation of Palestine and the Earth itself. They are the ones who have been awakened and radicalised through their children's eyes, who know that fighting for our collective futures gives our lives the deepest purpose and meaning. That leading through ‘mothering’ is the ultimate political work. 

My beautiful, brilliant friend (and eternal teacher!) Aditi Jaganathan left me a timely voice note this week that speaks to this:

“Without wanting to essentialise and flatten the complexity of womanhood: we have wombs and our wombs are portals, we carry life. There's so much knowledge woven into our bodies. There is so much power that we can share with others, power that’s not rooted in the Self but in the collective and the community. Most of us have been conditioned out of that collective way of being, but it’s so umbilically connected to what it is to care for and to mother. It has a simplicity, but, as we navigate the current capitalist colonial matrix, it's hard to sustain these innately radical practices.” 

Understandably, it’s so easy to feel a complete sense of loss and paralysis when we think about the state of our world. It’s so easy to feel like we have no power. When I think about this collective umbilical connection that Aditi mentions, it raises more questions and curiosities in me: how do we birth new leaders, men, women and those across the gender expansive spectrum to ‘mother’ and shepherd our Earth? How do we bring those who do not have children or are consciously choosing not to go into new forms of kinship, support, and family structures? How do we see the children who are already here today, whether they are in Gaza, London or anywhere else in the world, as our shared responsibility? How can we support each other and feel connected enough to step into our collective power? How can we transmute our fear of the future into action powered by love? How can we hold the grief and fury of the moment alongside the vision for a new world being birthed from under the rubble of our current apocalypse? 

I keep going back…

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(me between Yuriko aka Yuyu to my left and Viola Masako on my right)

Last month, I lost someone who will forever mean the world to me.

I met Viola Masako Nakamura Lam, known as ‘Vi’ or ‘Masa’ or ‘Grammy’ depending on who she was to you, in February 2016, thanks to one of my roommates at the time, the sweetest boy from LA named Jonathan. We lived in this big house full of big characters in East London, and despite Jonathan and me having never met before, we quickly became close through being forced to share one bathroom between the 5 of us. While living together one winter, I went to LA for a modelling job and mentioned to him that I was yearning to stay longer but that I needed somewhere to stay. 

“You should stay with my Grammy,” he suggested.

Considering my penchant for cross-generational friendships, this sounded like heaven, so I took him up on it!

After finishing my job, I headed to Viola’s directly from the set with my suitcase in an Uber, not knowing how this visit would impact my life forever. I pulled up to her beautiful mid-century American ranch-style home in Silverlake, the neighbourhood she has been a resident in for almost six decades — way before anyone could have imagined it’s evolution into what it is today — and there she was, this petite Japanese woman, waving to me in her cute jeans and a bright peach LL Bean sweater, adorned with the sweetest smile on her face. Even though we had never met, I couldn’t deny that there was something so utterly familiar about her to me. She gave me a small, shy hug, and I followed her into the house, where she swiftly showed me to my delightful room, and just like that, I was home. 

Over the next 10 days, we rarely stopped talking. She brought me into her rich inner and outer worlds, where her everyday and mundane were some of the greatest moments of my life. Going to the laundromat together, Qi Gong at the Senior Center, browsing the new hardcover books at Barnes and Noble, chatting with everyone who worked at the Gelson’s market on Sunset, and dim-sum lunches with her Asian golden gal cousins and siblings-in-law at Din Tai Fung. To this day, some of the latest nights I’ve had in this city have been with Viola. We stayed up, having TCM marathons and inhaling three classic golden age-old Hollywood movies back-to-back until the early hours. The mornings at the house held such a magical, ethereal quality. The California sun would drench the front rooms with such gorgeous light, and we would sit out on the back patio, drinking coffee while we eagerly awaited the hummingbirds to make an appearance to sip nectar from her giant red hibiscus bush, always leaving me filled with awe to carry me through the day. 

(her hibiscus bush on the back patio, with the hummingbird feeders I bought her many moons ago)

Los Angeles is famously isolating. Not only because of its sheer size and how it has been architecturally designed to separate people, but I’ve also found that this sense of isolation is caused by its transactional core, created by the magnified sense of capitalism here, where every little thing is monetized. Viola became the sturdy tree that helped me ground and grow roots of care, connection, and a sense of family in this strange city. After that first trip, we stayed close through phone calls, letters and book exchanges, and over the years I came to visit her as much as I could. Coming back to LA meant coming home to her, and this house that became a cocoon of love and family for me. Over time, she started telling people I was her granddaughter. Hearing this, my entire body would fizz in delight, making me feel whole in a way that I never knew I yearned for. 

The magical thing was that Viola could've genetically been my grandmother, being of both Japanese and Okinawan descent. It was fascinating to notice how some inherent things about her felt so Japanese, from external things like her making okayu (Japanese rice porridge) for breakfast or more internal processes like hiding her harder emotions. Being born and raised in California, she was also the ‘perfect’ American homemaker, so much so that when it came to carving out a career for herself, she became a Home Economics teacher in different high schools in the LA school district. Through her students and the schools themselves (depending on which neighbourhood they were in) she had unique windows into what she described as the world of ‘haves and have-nots’. She spent many years teaching at schools in ‘underserved’ communities, where the student body was mostly made up of inner-city kids from immigrant backgrounds, often from families who had literally just arrived in America.

She would tell me how her classes became this important haven where students could come, even if they didn’t speak English, to use their senses and learn how to cook, sew, and take care of themselves in ways that many didn’t know how. It would make her sad to know that for some students, the meal they would cook in class would be their only meal that day, but she loved seeing how many of them would gain this new sense of autonomy from the skills they learned with her. She always spoke fondly of these experiences. Despite her job being emotionally arduous, her students opened her up to so many worlds and cultures she had known nothing about, and she always loved bumping into one of her old students somewhere all grown up with many stories of their own to share. 

(Viola's sewing machine and work table in her home studio)

In touching on the moments that shaped her life, there is a dark but important chapter in Vi’s story, one that has often been purposely erased from history books that feels extra relevant to share in these times. Growing up on the West Coast of the United States in the 1940s meant she and her family fell victim to Executive Order 9066 signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in February 1942, after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour. Fueled by racism, xenophobia, and wartime hysteria, she and her family were subsequently sent to Poston, a Japanese internment camp in Arizona, for 2 years, alongside over 17,000 other members of the Japanese community.

Her memories of the camp are vague and hazy, as she was only three years old when they first arrived there, but she remembers how families lived in giant barracks all together, with nothing but a sheet or sometimes a plank of wood between them. She recounts how once in a blue moon they would watch movies, and in the films, she would be fascinated by people drinking from water fountains. Having access to water was so far removed from her reality that it became a dream that she fixated on. She said that camp is where she quickly learned about the Japanese concept of ‘gaman’, which in English roughly translates to a practice of resilience - that to survive in life: one had to suck it up and get on with it. 

(Viola as a baby with her mother Tsuruko Nakamura at camp in Arizona, 1942)

She and her family survived and, via a rehousing camp, eventually ended up in Downtown LA with $20 to their name, living in a hotel that was owned by some friends of friends. They had lost everything they had before the war: a family home, a thriving business, and their dignity and like many other Japanese Americans, they were forced to start all over again. She shared with me one of her earliest memories from this time, living downtown, starting kindergarten for the first time, she and her cousin Yuriko had to walk to school together, but since for most of their cognisant life they had lived in a dusty barrack in the desert with no roads, they had no idea how to cross the street. They would stand in front of the lights downtown arguing back and forth over what the traffic lights meant, which made them late for school. 

(Viola + and her cousin Yuriko as children when they first got out of camp)

(the last photo I took of Viola + Yuriko together in January 2023)

I asked Viola once if she felt angry at this country for wha…

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A piece all about crying. Crying in public, (re)learning to cry and crying as an act of resistance. love x

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Dear friends of TC,

I feel like I have a lot to be grateful for today, so lot of thank you’s are in order.

Firstly, I want to thank everyone who read/shared/engaged with the last post that I sent out back in October. I was really moved to hear from so many of you and it served as powerful reminder for me to keep going, that the personal is truly universal and the deeper I go within it somehow connects me even deeper to others and the world around me. I am also honoured to say that the post was selected by Substack readers to be a read of the week :)  - so thank you again so much for that. 

I ended that piece wondering if the sense of darkness that had been shrouding my vision was actually the darkness that comes with being back in the womb. And I am very glad to say that the last few months have really ended up being something like that. A shedding of the parts of myself or the beliefs I carried that were no longer serving me, a process of dying and grieving followed by the excitement brought on by a sense of rebirth. A big breakdown followed by a big breakthrough. Learning to sit in the discomfort of so much change at has ultimately allowed me to zoom out graciously to learn to see my life from a different perspective. All my greatest fears about this move have dissipated and on the other side of that surrender, I’ve been able to start to make peace with all the uncertainty that the future holds.

Yet at the same time, I can see some things very clearly. This moment has allowed me to start to connect the dots between all the things I have experienced and done across my life and the things I am called to do that at times have felt super random. I can now see how they have all been the crumbs on my path to my true purpose. I’ve been out here diving so deep, losing myself to find myself all over again but this time in a way that feels like I’m finally coming home to myself, a sacred remembering and a reunion of sorts. I am starting to be able to see my gifts and they are helping me remember who I am and what it is I am here to do. I don’t exactly know what shape these realisations will end up taking, that feels like the beauty of it, but this remaking of myself feels fundamental to moving forwards in my life. I am starting to know what I truly want to embody and how I can be of service to the world around me and that kind of clarity feels super grounding. Being away from London has given me a chance to take everything out of my life and decide what I want and who I want in it. Though funnily enough, I’m learning that it’s not actually really so much about where I live. That the external surroundings may speed up what’s happening, but the journey inwards is what it's really about, that liberation really comes from the inside. 

So, on that note, I am proud to share that this week marks the one-year anniversary of this newsletter’s existence! Reflecting back, this space has been a great teacher to me in unexpected ways. When I started it, I had the abstract idea that its purpose was to be about ‘tenderness’, a virtue I still feel is one of the tools to hold close for our collective survival and even though I had great intentions for it, it was also supposed to be a kind of productivity accountability exercise for myself. I wanted to write more and I saw it as a way of getting myself to commit to a weekly deadline. But now even just typing that sentence out makes me laugh and shake my head at myself because therein lay the big lesson for me. 

Yes, sure I want to write more. But I want every word I write to carry truth, depth and meaning. Despite how we’ve been socialised under capitalism, more doesn’t necessarily equate to better and since I am grateful to have another income stream that currently doesn’t depend on writing (even though Iongterm I am hoping that I will be making a living that feels more aligned with who I am becoming) meaning I have the great privilege of being able to write what I want when I want. Yes, discipline and commitment are important but there are so many ways of embracing those qualities. I have deeply committed to myself and others and been more disciplined than I ever have in numerous ways but it’s just been offline and behind closed doors. Yes, tenderness is important but how can I write about it if I don’t even know how to practise it towards myself? I spent months carry heavy guilt and shame over my lack of ‘productivity’, at my so-called laziness that it took me months to understand that something much deeper was happening under the surface. 

I had gotten it all wrong. This newsletter wasn't about churning anything out fast, it was here to teach me the importance of slowness, the magic of deep pondering and the soft power of the pause. Over time I realised that for me to write as truthfully as possible I had to go deep within myself to explore and that just doesn’t happen on a timely neatly-packed schedule. I’ve been slowly learning to forgive myself for this so-called lack that I was basing too much of my day-to-day sense of self-worth on to start to see it instead as a blessing, as the thing that makes me, me. And so over these 12 months it’s ended up becoming a site of deep self-reckoning, reflection and transformation. 

I’ve grown up sharing myself and connecting with the world through the internet. But over the years the addictiveness, algorithmic oppression, and hyper-surveillance engineered into the platforms we use have left me with a sense of great unease, mistrust and caution. This place has become a site of refuge on the internet to reclaim what I once loved and through it, I am learning to love again. So thank you so very much to all of you who have been reading these words over the last year. It feels good to know that we are out here learning together. Thank you for all the personal notes, emails and messages. And an extra big thank you to those of you who have been generously paying me for this spontaneous newsletter. I am still learning to see myself as someone who deserves to get paid to do this work so I’m truly grateful to have your support. 

We have so much to reckon with. Our generation has so much to undo and make sense of so we can build the world anew. But we are bombarded with so much information on a daily basis that we become deprived of the space, both physical and mental, necessary to grow and change. That’s what this newsletter has gifted me. Reminders to take a deep breath and reflect, so I can then take my learnings back out into the world and try to be as intentional as possible with everything I say and do. There is a huge shift in consciousness happening everywhere as we wake up to the lies instilled in us by patriarchy, white supremacy and capitalism that we have been socialised to believe in. We are being called into service of a new world and each and every single one of us has our own unique part to play. The pause helps us to try to understand what that role is. 

In this era of immediacy, reactivity and being able to be contacted anywhere at any time in too many formats, the pause has become priceless. A lot of us learned that back in 2020 but since then have been forced to forget and now we are often left to feel that it’s become a luxury that we feel we can no longer afford. But the pause is vital to our survival as much as our joy and can be cultivated in the smallest of ways. It might look like taking a breath, a day, a week to gather your thoughts and feelings before responding to a message. Asking for more time to reflect in the heat of an argument. A weekend off social media. A walk in the park without listening to anything but the wind and the trees. From micro to macro, start small and witness the expansion for yourself. For there is always more room where they told us there wasn’t any to be found. 

The pause shows me what a true blessing it is to have a roof over my head, with food in my belly and to feel the warmth. I look outside everywhere to see that in our broken society these t…

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Back in July, I wrote on here about leaving London, the place that has been my home and my deepest anchor for the last 16 years of my life, to take a big leap of faith to move to Milan to give it a real go with someone I’ve been in a long-distance relationship with. I mainly came here to see if we could really make it work but there was a small part of me that also wanted to test myself. I wanted to see how I could create another life, somewhere new and out of my comfort zone. If we are so often heavily shaped by the places we live in and the people with whom we spend our time, I wanted to know how this experience would change me. Who could I be here? What could I learn here? Now that I have an opportunity to reinvent myself, what do I want that to look like and what do I want to leave behind? I stated unequivocally that I wanted to challenge myself, but now I am here, feeling what it actually means to do so. 

Over the last few months, I’ve been experiencing a daily kind of anxiety that’s been dancing on the edge of depression. I’ve let all my deepest fears creep in through my veins and they’ve been trying to control my reality as much as possible. The negative thoughts and fears start as soon as I wake up. They are with me in the shower, they are in bed with us and eat with us at the table. They scream “why did you leave your life, your friends, your beautiful home - are you insane?”.  I’ve been having panic attacks and my stomach has been in knots with bloating so severe that for the last few weeks I have looked deeply pregnant when I am not. I have spent more days than I care to count this summer in a worried haze unable to see the beauty around me. The floor beneath me is crumbling away and I am clutching with every last bit of strength onto a single branch for dear life. The discomfort of big change gnawing away at my very being.

I am in a transition and I am grieving. I am learning that transition sometimes feels like “What in the actual f**k have I just done?”, like absolute terror and the greatest of curiosity bound together as one giant speedball of experience. I thought I had lived a life that had prepared me to be attuned to doing something like this (and I know deep down that it has) but I can’t deny that this time around, the process is hitting very differently from the times before. I am (and feel) older, overwhelmed, exhausted, and laden with both literal and figurative grief and baggage from living in a broken world on a dying planet. Time keeps getting more slippery in the way it has been constructed to make us constantly feel like it’s something we’re running out of. Despite my trying to reinvent my own measures of time, of success, of what a life deemed worthy feels like to me, all these years of conditioning and what it’s done to the inner workings of my mind are hard to shake. The ego-level intentions rooted in fear and my own unworthiness keep trying to take over to tell me that something is missing, that something is wrong. 

I moved here because the person I am with is a beautiful person. He is so sweet and so joyous and we laugh so much every single day. After the last difficult few years, I felt like sweetness, joy and laughter are exactly what I needed. He shows me unabated unconditional love and care in ways I’ve never experienced before. But we’ve grown up in such different worlds, from different planets, and sometimes I fear they are too different. On days when we don’t see eye to eye, alone in this city and alone in my mind I look at him and quickly proceed to plan my escape. On those bad days, I find myself being hyper-critical and judgemental about him, mean even. Picking holes in him, his habits and his character, constantly listing all the things I decide he is lacking in, making the holes bigger and bigger. But like the sweet, soft person he is, he has learned to accept me as I am before I have and therein lies the problem. He can see through me and I want to run away. I walk the streets of this city and off the bat, it doesn’t feel like a natural fit for me, it never had, but something made me come anyway. On the surface level, it matches its reputation of being conservative, elitist and superficial. The lack of diversity and the visible racialised poverty is a real shock to the system coming from London. But sometimes places like this, the ones that make you work hard for it, where it’s not always so quick to be found, with some time and determination will reveal precious things in their depths. And as time goes on I’m starting to see that this discomfort I’m carrying isn’t just about the city itself, the relationship, or him. This is about me. 

It’s becoming clear that I’ve moved to a new place but the ghosts of my past have followed me here. For the longest time, because of things that happened in my early life and the world I have been socialised in, I have felt unworthy. Not smart enough, not successful enough, like I was falling behind friends/peers, lacking in some way or another, never quite ‘good enough’. Working as a model for all these years has kept me working enough to live but also kept me in some kind of arrested development where the work itself hasn’t matched where I’m at spiritually in such a long time. Even though I co-authored a book on social media and can clearly see how it can wreak havoc on our sense of self I have not been immune to its effects. I’ve been afraid to really dream about what else could be out there for me because I haven’t had the confidence to leap. Instead of just focusing on how to become the most authentic version of myself I have been caught up in things that don’t actually matter and been left to perform a version of myself that was no longer true to me. I’ve been trapped in a cycle of reactivity that has meant that I am not seeing and feeling things as they actually are. I am experiencing life through my emotions and through my past hurt as if I am wearing glasses made from my conditioning that blur my everyday vision. How can I ever truly be an authentic version of myself while still wearing these thick-rimmed and heavy glasses? I don’t want to wear them anymore. I don’t want to lose sight of my higher self’s true nature and calling by creating a life experience that is not aligned with my heart. I want to show up every day as a more compassionate person. The type of person that listens deeply and pauses before responding. The type of person where I’m still honouring my truth but one that is more rooted in the person I’m still in the process of becoming. By learning to recognise the many egoic selves and masques I’ve been wearing for most of my life my vision is only getting clearer. 

These days I am trying to garner the deep courage needed to invite fear and worry into the picture to walk beside me as a friend to help me embrace this total transition of everything: self, work, place, relationship etc. I often find myself doing things without understanding why till much later. Intuition and hindsight are sacred gifts and I am sure this move, this relationship and this newsletter all fall under those categories. Instead of shying away from this space when I don’t feel my best, I am sending this out as a way of honouring what it was and still is meant for: archiving the messiness of transformation, cultivating softness through hard times and embracing our full humanity. I am learning that to be tender with oneself is hard, full of fallbacks, and spirals but also so much humbling beauty. 

Since this piece does reference our relationship, I read it to him to make sure I had his consent with what I was sharing. His response was “this is so beautiful'' and gave me a long hug which made me ugly cry in his arms. My fears and insecurities are seen and acknowledged but somehow they do not shake him and this is why I love him. Maybe I needed to leave London so I could actually hear the needs of my higher self clearly away from all my usual distractions, so I can really start to drea…

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(if you would prefer to listen to this instead of reading it, click the audio version above)

Sweet friends of TC,

How are you all doing out there? It feels like such a heavy time in the world once again with so many crises colliding at once. I am thinking of you all and sending you a lot of love.

In my last letter, I loosely mentioned that I was in the process of moving but what I didn’t actually say was that I was leaving London, the city that has been my home for longer than I’ve lived anywhere in my entire life and the process just took every ounce of energy from me. 

For the last few years, I’ve been sitting in that feeling of yearning to be transformed by something unknown to me still. I could feel it out there, like a personal whisper, only intelligible by me, calling me back into the wild, inviting me to find myself by losing myself. Thus ensued a somewhat vigorous process of trial and elimination to try to understand what about my life needed to change. Was it related to my work life? Love or a relationship? Was it spiritual? Geographical? And could any of these things even be separated for me or were they all somehow deeply embedded and intertwined? 

Then the pandemic came and like so many of us, that urge to change everything about my life only felt stronger. That it was time to do something different, be something different and the time was now, but what, how and where? Without a clear answer, I asked the universe to show me the way. Then early last summer, unexpectedly, while on a road trip from the south of France to the south of Italy with my brother, after 3 years of being very much on my own (a lot of that time was super nourishing, some of it incredibly lonely), I met someone so sweet and wonderful, who made me laugh, who made me feel very loved and cared for. We’ve been seeing each other ever since albeit long-distance with them being in Milan and me in London and at the start of the year, we decided to try and make a go at experimenting with what a life together could maybe look like. We went back and forth on our viable options but since I was the one yearning to get up and move, even though Milan is a city I’ve never had a connection to, where I know almost no one, I saw this as the crumb along the path that I’d been looking for and decided to take the leap to move to Italy to see what else this path could have in store for me.

Despite the move being something I’ve been and am still very excited about, the physical act of preparing for it brought up this familiar sense of dread and loneliness. I’ve had my fair share of lonely difficult moves, here are some that come to mind: a charming ex who already had a new girlfriend before we broke up, who left me to move out of our apartment alone in a blizzard, roommates who made my life unbearable, painful departures I didn’t want because I had run out of money and options. But when I stop to think about why moving always brings up so much, it's probably a lot to do with what felt at times like an unstable childhood. Having to leave Japan and everything/everyone we knew to go somewhere where we knew no one, where we were constantly carted in and out of our family home which my newly-widowed single mom rented out as her only source of income. Other families ate around our kitchen table and slept in our beds so we could keep living. The constant moving was hard for us, but we were kids, we learned to adapt, but seeing how difficult and lonely it was for my mother is a wound I seem to have inherited. After months of living in this repetitive cycle of culling, selling, donating and sorting, when it came to the actual packing part I somehow pulled my lower back out and from one moment to the next I could barely sit, stand or lie down let alone lift or carry anything, the body does keep the score after all. My yoga teacher Salimah reminded me that lower back pain is a lot to do with not feeling supported. She told me to call in my reinforcements. Learning to ask for help when I need it is a skill that I’m still learning, but I did it and it was beautiful to see my people come through for me. A note and a reminder to myself that giving and receiving should feel equal.

I moved to London at 19, clueless and lusty for life. It’s the city that shaped my very being, the place that made me, that I made myself in. That kind of home, that kind of comfort, in a city that has held you in all your forms, is really hard to leave. I am now in this surreal in-between, where my body is here in this new place, my mind knows what's up but my heart hasn’t quite caught up yet. I guess moving, especially for those of us that are immensely fortunate enough to even be able to travel and move freely through the world, is one of those things that becomes more ‘real’ with time, like when you have a bad day and your best friend isn’t around the corner to make you feel better. I know I will never lose the things I’ve played a part in making, the community in the truest sense of the word that I’ve cultivated, and those relationships and places will stay with me forever. Still, I can’t deny that I already miss them terribly. That somewhat bittersweet taste of change, to leave the things you love behind, to try something new, to risk it all, to open yourself up to the unknown and thus to all the ways in which life can surprise us.  

This experiment of moving, this experiment of love, who knows what will happen? As mere mortals, nothing is forever. Absolutely nothing is promised to me, nor any of us, but there is everything to be gained in the process of experimentation. In this time of so much division, hate and pain, in this crisis of imagination, I am choosing to lean into the unknown, to try to imagine a new way of living in the name of love. Not merely in just a romantic sense but a truest deepest love for life itself.

It only feels right to end with this piece from Octavia E. Butler’s `The Book of the Living’ a fictional scripture created by Lauren Olamina, her protagonist in her brilliant, almost scarily profound and timely book ‘Parable of the Sower’. When I first read these words, they swirled around my mind all day, all night and really started to restructure how I saw the world. I got the title tattooed so that I can look at it whenever I feel unsure, scared and lost. They remind me of the beautiful impermanence of everything and that if one wants to truly live, one must learn to lean into the unknown because therein lies life itself.  

—

God is Change

All that you touch

You Change.

All that you Change

Changes you.

The only lasting truth

Is Change.

God

Is Change.

—

Love,

Naomi

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